6 Nerd Culture Stereotypes That Are Way Older Than You Think

#3. Arguing About What's Canon in a Fictional Universe Dates Back to the 1900s

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Anyone who's heard and shuddered at the phrase "Extended Universe" understands the issues nerds face when deciding what is and is not canon. But that's not a symptom of our modern movie-obsessed culture cultivating a bunch of die-hard fanboys -- devotees of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novels have been having this same angry, asthmatic, spit-flying argument since the turn of the 20th century.

By the early 1900s, Holmes was so popular that anybody with a pen and the ability to use the word "elementary" as an insult gave writing him a shot. This resulted in such memorable adventures as "the case of Holmes dying from sniffing too much anesthetic." And so the canon debate began. Which is nowhere near as cool as a cannon debate.

Two Doyle stories, "The Lost Special" and "The Man With the Watches," feature an unnamed amateur detective. Some say it was Holmes, others say it was not, and the bloodshed has not let up since. Then there are the parodies. Doyle wrote two silly little short stories, "How Watson Learned the Trick" and "The Field Bazaar," that technically fit all the criteria for canon, even though there's no crime, Holmes solves no mystery, and one of them ("Trick") began life as a prop in Queen Mary's dollhouse. But hey, if you ever wondered how Holmes and Watson ate breakfast, these are the depressingly mundane tales for you.

Arguing about the canonical status of stories was just the start for old-timey obsessive Holmes nerds. One long-running fan club, The Speckled Band of Boston (their slogan: "For us, it is always 1895." Presumably their clubhouse is period-authentic with penny-farthings and rampaging syphilis), went so far as to research old train schedules to track exactly which town Holmes visits in "The Adventure of the Empty House." Another group of obsessive fans, The Baker Street Irregulars, has spent thousands of hours trying to decipher clues about the more mundane details of the stories, such as Holmes' birthday and whether Watson was wounded in the arm or leg. This is demonstrated in their collection of internal correspondence and history (think a slower, more dignified predecessor to forums and message boards). This collection fills five volumes. It only collects up until the late 1940s. The group was founded in 1934.

Hemera Technologies/AbleStock.com/Getty ImagesTheir pub burned to the ground in the Great Flame War of 1948.

Next time you picture those noble, stubble-jawed, old-fashioned soldiers fighting in the trenches, remember that at least some of them were fighting about whether or not the extended universe "counts."

#2. Making Fan Films Dates Back to the 1920s

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If your favorite show or movie franchise has jumped the shark so hard it left a shark carcass in low-Earth orbit, you can always make your own version. Fan films are a big thing nowadays, and technology has made it so that a Modern Warfare film shot for $200 can aaaalmost pass for a legitimate movie. Get a bigger budget, and your Tomb Raider or Wolverine film rivals any direct-to-video sequel starring somebody who kind of looks like the famous actor that played the character in the first film.

But producing a technically illegal homage to your favorite characters is not a new nerd pastime. Fans have been doing this since the mid 1920s, when a couple amateur filmmakers decided to make their very own Our Gang episode. More commonly known as The Little Rascals, Our Gang ran from 1922 to 1944 and showcased the semi-scripted antics of a fat kid whose personality consisted of being fat, a black kid who was certainly both black and a kid, and a girl, who performed a gripping portrayal of somebody who is not a boy. It was a less complicated time for filmic narrative.

The "Anderson Our Gang" silent film, made in 1925, did not deviate much from the actual show, aside from assigning new names to the characters. These names did not, unfortunately, break new creative ground: The freckled kid was named "Freckles," the fat one was named "Fat," and the bully was named "Toughy."

Much like most modern fan films, there's no real plot to speak of -- just a series of sketches where the kids run around and do Our Gang kinds of things. At the end of the reel, the kids terrorize a newly married couple like good little psychopaths, and the cops punish them by taking them to ... a parade? That can't be right. Ah! There's a lost second reel to the film, where the Gang breaks into a circus and completely fucks up the place. Once caught, the exasperated owner punishes them with ... ice cream. What? Did we invert the concept of punishment sometime in the 1950s?

WikipediaIt was decided that sentencing the Nazis at Nuremberg to puppy cuddling would send the wrong message.

#1. Science Fiction Is Almost 2,000 Years Old

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Science fiction knows what it likes, and likes to do those things over and over again. Why change? Aliens and spaceships and laser-blasters are all awesome. But where did these ideas come from? Gene Roddenberry? The pulp magazines of the 1930s? H.G. Wells or Jules Verne or one of those other old-timey dudes with the hats? Nope -- as it turns out, pretty much every space theme imaginable came to light damn near 2,000 years ago. And the guy who invented them did so as a complete joke.

Uriel Sinai/Getty Images News/Getty ImagesWhich he tried to explain, unsuccessfully, as they nailed him to a cross.

Syrian author Lucian's "True History" was a satirical literary reaction to people like Ctesias and Iambulus, who wrote of incredible adventures in exotic locales they had never visited. Lucian took that practice to its logical limit and created an entire literary genre in the process.

The tale itself relates the time a giant whirlwind plops Lucian and his friends on the moon. From there, Lucian and company take part in a great space war between Endymion, the leader of the moon, and Phaethon, the king of the sun. There are Dog-Acorns, Cloud-Centaurs, and Tree-Men that reproduce by planting their own testicles in the lunar surface, from which a giant dick tree grows. Makes "green women" and "aliens with slightly messed up foreheads" seem downright tame by comparison.

Some of Lucian's ideas are more outlandish and implausible than dick-trees. For example, the sun people's plot to build a giant sun wall to block light to the moon likely breaks the reader's suspension of disbelief, no matter how invested in the plight of the treesticles they've become. But for the most part, Lucian nailed all the basics of the modern science fiction epic -- he just did it all in a whiny, mockingly high-pitched voice to show you how stupid you were for liking that kind of crap.

Oh, and at the end of the book, Lucian promises to tell further stories in the future. As far as we know, this never happened, meaning it's been two millennia without any kind of follow-up. So the next time you whine about George R.R. Martin taking a decade between A Song of Ice and Fire books, just know that the hardcore Lucianites have it worse.